Passage Cardinet

Passage Cardinet is the street in Paris’s 17th arrondissement that led the narrator to the apartment of Madame P-R, where she underwent a clandestine abortion in January 1964. First encountered through directions from LB, it became both the setting of a decisive event and a physical route by which the narrator later tested her memory against the altered city.

Address and Approach

In the weeks before Christmas, LB gave the narrator Madame P-R’s address and described her work. The address was initially presented as an impasse, a word that suggested to the narrator the hidden, disreputable setting of a backstreet abortionist. LB clarified that the passage opened onto Rue Cardinet, a main street. The place name itself meant little to the narrator, who associated it instead with a jewelry store advertised on the radio.

The address carried practical information as well as a destination. LB said that Madame P-R inserted a probe and that the narrator would then wait for the pregnancy to end. She described the woman as reliable and attentive to hygiene, while also disclosing that she herself had contracted septicemia after the procedure. LB advised obtaining antibiotics afterward; the narrator already had a penicillin prescription. The fee was four hundred francs, and LB offered to lend the money. In this account, Passage Cardinet first arrives not as a view of a street but as a set of instructions, risks, and arrangements passed from one woman to another.

On January 8, the narrator travelled to Paris to settle the date and practical details. She hitched a lift from the road out of town in sleet, then continued by Métro from Neuilly. At night, she emerged in the 17th arrondissement and found a street sign reading Passage Cardinet, rather than the name she had expected. The discrepancy felt encouraging. She reached an old, dilapidated building, where Madame P-R lived on the third floor; the apartment occupied only two rooms.

The Apartment and the January Visit

At the first meeting, Madame P-R concentrated on essentials: the narrator’s last period, the proposed method, the date, and the cash fee. She said she could proceed the following Wednesday, when she could bring home a speculum from the hospital where she worked. Her matter-of-fact approach made the exchange strangely reassuring to the narrator. The Passage Cardinet thus became associated not only with fear, but also with a practical encounter in which the woman’s refusal to dwell on emotion kept the arrangement moving.

On Wednesday, January 15, the narrator returned to the neighborhood more than an hour before the appointment. On a wet, mild day, she entered Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church and sat for a long time, then waited in a nearby café over tea. She watched the time and went to the café restroom before leaving, following a habit formed in childhood. The route to the apartment was therefore preceded by pauses in ordinary public places: the church, the café, and its washroom.

Madame P-R had prepared for the visit in her small apartment. The narrator remembers a saucepan on the gas ring and a table set up beside the bed. Madame P-R spoke while preparing to proceed, including a story of a woman who had died after another abortionist’s dangerous practice. The story was meant as reassurance, though the narrator later understood that it also reflected Madame P-R’s insistence on doing the work properly. The apartment’s narrow rooms and the passage outside it frame a scene in which the narrator, isolated by the secrecy of the procedure, depended on a stranger whose professional manner was both unsettling and practical.

Afterward, Madame P-R gave basic instructions about what to expect and what to do if the anticipated outcome did not occur. They drank coffee in the kitchen. Concerned about the narrator’s journey home, Madame P-R insisted on accompanying her to Pont-Cardinet station, keeping her coat on over her slippers. They walked together along the passage toward the station. The narrator wanted to leave alone, yet accepted the escort rather than offend her. In the street, she felt exposed to the people they passed and experienced the older woman beside her as a protective, almost maternal presence, while remaining repelled by her appearance. Passage Cardinet was consequently remembered as a space of contradictory dependence: the place of a frightening encounter and the route along which its attendant saw the narrator safely away.

Return and the Work of Memory

Decades later, while writing about the experience, the narrator returned to Passage Cardinet to locate the café and church she remembered. She had consulted a map of Paris beforehand. The street now bore a new plaque, with the old, blackened, illegible sign left above it. The street was empty, and a large sign on a ground-floor building identified an association of survivors of Nazi camps and deportees, something she did not remember seeing before.

The building where Madame P-R had lived was still identifiable, but its entrance was locked and fitted with a digital entry system. The narrator walked down the middle of the passage toward the narrow opening where light showed at its far end; no people or cars passed. The former address had become inaccessible, and the return did not restore the past as a complete scene. Instead, the changed entrance and street furniture marked the distance between the remembered visit and the present-day location.

The church proved to be Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church, not the Saint-Charles-Borromée that the narrator had thought she remembered. She guessed that she might have lit a candle there for Saint Rita, associated with lost causes. The café was harder to identify. None of those she surveyed seemed familiar, so she entered Café Brazza and checked its small restroom, recalling the mirror and washbasin from the minutes before her appointment. Its layout offered no decisive confirmation: the toilet was of a common type, and she could not remember whether that particular café had one.

Passage Cardinet matters in the narrative because it gives a precise geography to an experience that secrecy and distress might otherwise leave abstract. The narrator can recover the sequence of streets, rooms, and pauses, yet cannot make every remembered detail agree with the present-day city. A street name changes, an entrance is sealed, and a church’s identity becomes uncertain; the account preserves these mismatches rather than resolving them. The passage remains at once an actual Paris address and a material trace through which the narrator approaches, without fully possessing, the past.